Video Biography – Why Are We Recording Memories?

I have been working on what I refer to as a long-format video biography. My client has hired me for a year to develop a personal history as well as to film significant events during the year. We’ve been doing this since November 2011 and so far we’ve shot four different events. A couple of the events, we’ve turned into short individual videos to send out to people who attended while other footage is waiting to fit into its bigger scope.

Sunday I was at my client’s Super Bowl party, filming family and friends enjoying the day together. I had a small crew although with myself, a cameraman, an audio technician and a grip, it’s difficult to not stand out like a sore thumb. We had my client and his wife with fixed microphones and filmed many of their interactions with other guests. It was fun, a kind of “a day in the life of” format.

I ran into a friend of mine who was a guest at the party. He was a bit baffled by our presence. He said, “why is he doing this?” I explained that he wanted to create a record of his family’s life for a year. He thought about it for a minute and said, “who is it for?” Now this friend of mine has known me for several years and I know he knows what I do in my work so it surprised me that he hadn’t really connected the dots. I told him that his friend (my client) was creating a record of his life and who he was at this given year in time. That this piece, and the interactions with friends and family we were there to capture, would explain to future generations of his family who he was, how he behaved and what he was interested in. A video “time capsule”. That rather than anecdotal stories passed down, great-grandchildren would actually experience some major family events, hearing his voice, seeing him laugh and showing how the family interacts. This is very different than parking a camera in front of someone and saying, “ok, tell me about your life.”

At one point, I had my cleint sitting with his two brothers and reminiscing about childhood events such as when their father died. A funny memory came up, a time the older brother held the younger brother upside down over a toilet. The youngest said that to this day, the other guys who were there still profusely apologize to him when they run into him. There was a lot of really great moments captured during this filming and everyone had fun knowing they were creating this video moment.

I’m still not sure my friend truly grasped what was going on. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him further, but saw that he was wrestling with some of the usual conversations that pop up and that if I’d spent a bit more time talking with him, he would probably come to see the value in what his friend was doing.

It’s not unusual to think about how much it’s going to cost, how much time it’s going to take, and often, the question of who would want us to do this comes up. Some people are concerned with feeling egotistical in doing a video about themselves. I try to explain that this really isn’t about you, it’s about an investment in the future. What would you give to have a recording of your relatives who are no longer with you?

WELCOME

Stefani Twyford is a video biographer in Houston Texas whose mission is to help families, individuals, companies and organizations chronicle history, share life stories, connect generations and preserve their legacies in timeless, high-quality multimedia presentations.Read more about Stefani...

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QUOTES

"The stories that we tell ourselves function to order our world, serving both a foundation upon which each of us constructs our sense of reality and filter through which we process each event that confronts us every day. The values that we cherish and wish to preserve, the behavior that we wish to censure, the tears and dread that we can barely confess in ordinary language, the aspirations and goals that we most dearly prize--all of these things are encoded in the stories that each culture invents and preserves for the next generation, stories that, in effect, we live by and through."Henry Louis Gates Literary Critic, Scholar, Writer and Teacher Chair: African American Studies at Harvard University

“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.” The Single-Parent Family: Living Happily in a Changing World by Marge Kennedy and Janet Spencer King. New York: Crown, 1994

“By looking into another person’s life, you need to look into your own. Whether you are the biographer or whether you are the reader. It’s like truth is stranger than fiction. When I am reading a biography, there is something more rewarding about reading about a real person’s life, rather than fiction.” On Writing Biographies: Kevin Fitzpatrick interviews Marion Meade about Buster, Woody, Zelda, and Mrs. Parker for Small Spiral Notebook

“The art of interviewing is as personal as the art of writing. Every reporter brings a different demeanor and skill to the job of interviewing ... But all interviews are designed to accomplish one mission: Get information to advance a story. This is best achieved with organization and preparation, whether it's a five-minute phone interview or a two-hour confrontational affair.” Les Zaitz, Senior Investigative Reporter for The Oregonian from his tip sheet on interviewing

"The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip."Leon Edel, U.S. biographer, critic. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series

"Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it."Rabbi Harold Kushner

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it."Benjamin Disraeli

"All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)" Antonio Damasio
A Story We Tell Ourselves
Time Magazine 1/18/2007

"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness." Alex Haley, Roots

"We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium." Ansel Adams

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”Dickens, David Copperfeild,
p. 2 1850 edition

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?Mary Oliver - The Summer Day

“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”Harlan Ellison

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."John Lennon

"When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that. I wanted some researchers I'd worked with to talk to my mother, but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids. "Robert de Niro, quoted in Esquire

WELCOME

Stefani Twyford is a video biographer in Houston Texas whose mission is to help families, individuals, companies and organizations chronicle history, share life stories, connect generations and preserve their legacies in timeless, high-quality multimedia presentations.Read more about Stefani...